The Parlor

This was a cover image to accompany Dan Mulhollen's story "The Man in the Front Parlor".

I had seen some interesting pictures in the Smithsonian Flickr gallery, (with no copyright) and thought that a crop from one of them might do.

After cropping to get the corner of the room I wanted, I added a layer in Photoshop for "painting" the black and white image.

Then, after merging the layers, I ran it through the Paint Daubs filter just to take the rough edges off.

That was yesterday. There has to be something cool to do today.

Variations on a Theme

Lillian did a painting, in tempera paints, and then promptly forgot about it, and left it lying somewhere.

I took it and cleaned up the edges with scissors,  not completely at ease with her choice of colors. Still, she is bold, and I am not, so I decided to use colors as close to her palette as I could and toss strokes onto a page, using her painting as a model.

It was fun to do, and while we had the really cold snap when I couldn't be out in the studio, I was pining for it.

When I was done, Lillian happened to come out to the garage studio to see what was going on, so I showed her my pastel, explaining that I was looking at her work while I did it.

She patiently explained to me that she had left white paper showing on hers, and that the color in the lower half had been mixed to make a kind of peach color. She wasn't exactly critical, but she knew it wasn't a replica.

 "It's called variations on a theme," I told her. "Similar, but not the same."

She was good with that, and so am I.

Sunset in Winter

That's what the sky looked like when I was leaving the parking lot of the church last night.

As I've said before, I love the gradient colors of sunrise and sunset. Last night the temperature was dropping rapidly in the chilling clear air. While I waited in line to get to the exit, I marvelled at the bright orange at the horizon.

The shadow of the orchard to the west of the parking lot was completely dark.  Such simple colors, but so beautiful.

Writing again

Yesterday I was working on an abstract pastel, but it was too cold to open the garage door for adequate lighting for a photograph. Maybe tomorrow.

Today my bit was a story in Word, who knows if it will actually go anywhere.

""Do we have common ground any more?" the troll said, in a rumbly low voice that was pitched not to wake Melody.

 

"Well, let's see. Beer?" I looked at Margot.

 

She nodded.

 

"Fine dining? Bathhouses? Okay, that's three. Travel afoot? Four. Getting into trouble and knocking the shit out of miscreants? Five. Oh, and let's see, involvements that happen to exclude the other members of the company, would that be six? Or do I have to mention that empath you ruffled when we passed through my clan lands the last time?"

Well, that's part of it, anyway.

Creative effort. 

Sick of Damn Stalin

The last few days I have been looking at pictures of Stalin.

I have no interest in Josef Stalin beyond learning enough about him that I don't want to grow up to be like him, but he was the central character in Barry Udoff's cover story "Why Stalin Slept" -- and so ... 

I started by Googling "Stalin" images. Nothing I found was in the public domain, and the Smithsonian's and Library of Congress's Flickr sites had yer basic nothing.

So I thought I would just draw him, from some photo.

Guess again. What I was seeing, I was not able to make come across on paper. Pictures of Stalin ooze suspicion and arrogance, and I was unable to capture it.

Not only was I not able to capture the "spirit" of the photographs, I also could not seem to make them silly enough.

 This one I started in pencil, switched to ballpoint pen, then to a flexible-tip marker for the boldness. No go, doesn't look like Stalin, and even had I greened in the face goo, it would not have looked particularly funny.

That it doesn't look like him is strange, because I blew up a photo of him in Photoshop, dragged my light table out of the closet and installed it in my new studio (which I have been meaning to do for months) and actually traced the dictator's face.

In aggravation, I turned again to a search for public domain photos, and found some on Wikipedia, a site I don't trust at all, but does come up with public domain pictures, damn them for being useful.

Once again I downloaded the photo, printed it out after re-sizing it in Photoshop, and set to with the light table.

I gave it up as soon as the pencil sketch was done, and came back inside (shedding fingerless mitts and heavy duty sweats) and frantically resumed my search for public domain pics that might serve.

I found one, finally, and after yet another learning experience with Photoshop, was able to cobble up Stalin in a turban and green facial.

Then I was ready to leave the too-hot kitchen and slink back out to my chilly studio, and finish inking the second sketch, just because I should. 

Doesn't look like Stalin. Lacks movement. Sucks. Still, I did it in ballpoint, and still like the way a ballpoint pen handles. 

Nevertheless, I'm weary of Stalin (for the moment) and think I'll draw some ... I dunno. Flamingos. Raccoons. Old nude women who still think they're hott.  Something. Just not Stalin.

Dink the Crude

This is my first attempt at doing a portrait of Dink in Photoshop.

I can see after the fact that I should have limited the palette of colors more, and where I made mistakes in how I sequenced layers, but it's not too bad for a first crack. I like the speckles, and the tail. And the mane. The mane worked out really well, using a "grass" brush on a separate layer, and then rotating it with "Transform" and using the "Move" tool to put it in place.

I wrote a little bit last night, some 200 words on a new fiction story, just trying an idea on for size. 

Tonight I still have ashes to clear from the woodstove firebox, and kindling to arrange -- tomorrow is an "Okay To Burn" day, and I can't wait for the steady, healing heat of the woodstove instead of the ineffective puffing of the gas furnace.

Another day, another little creative effort.

No Picture of the Pictures

Today's studio project was to complete Step Three of my archiving of the 1972 cartoon "The Biting Poltergeist."

I've forgotten to blog about Step One and Step Two, so I guess I should do that here, too.

"The Biting Poltergeist" was drawn on several large pages of newsprint paper, back in 1972. One of my favorite mediums was blue Bic ballpoint pen. They tended to leak a little with overuse; I liked the sometimes globby result. I would sketch in pencil, ink the sketch, and then erase out the pencil lines. The newsprint pad had a roughish surface that took the ink like a dream.

The history behind the cartoon can be found at my other blog, this is more for the work I'm doing currently.

Step One, which just about gave me the hives, was to cut each individual frame out of the sheet of paper (each sheet was 24" x 30", I believe) with a utility knife. The paper is so fragile that it's disintegrating in spots. Newsprint may have taken the ink, but there's nothing permanent about it. One wrong twitch and an old cartoon could bite the dust.

Step Two was to cut up the empty pages of the newsprint pad into 8 1/2" x 11" rectangles. The plan was to affix the frames to similar newsprint, and then scan them before putting them into archival plastic sleeves, never to be touched again. That took the better part of an afternoon, plying the utility knife again as well as my reasonably good quality paper cutter.

Step Three was today, carefully using rubber cement to anchor the cartoons onto their individual old newsprint sheets.  (I'd tested the rubber cement on some scraps a few days ago to make sure it wouldn't discolor the old paper. Looked fine!) 

The studio is covered with drying paper sheets, and it was COLD out there, as I had the front garage door open so that Lil and her friend could play while I worked. 45 degrees is not all that bad, oddly enough, but by the time I was done pasting and numbering the 33 frames, I was ready to call it a night and come inside to find some supper and let my kneecaps warm up.

Step Four will be to scan each page into my computer; Five will be long and arduous, Photoshopping out the flaws in the paper. Six will be a modernization of the dialogue bubbles, and Seven will be uploading them to the Press so that they all have a copyright on them.

"Nightfall"

There is an hour or so each week when I am nailed to a seat and forced to occupy my mind.

I take my granddaughter to her religion class every Wednesday after school; while she drives some volunteer teacher batty, I sit in the car and wait, with my laptop and/or drawing pads and/or notebook.

There are no dishes to jump up and wash, no Press work to be done without an internet connection; the church grounds are out in the country, so aside from the graveyard, there is no place to take a walk, and it's too dark at that time of day (and cold) anyway.

So in these dim days of December, the laptop is the toy of choice. I installed Photoshop on my laptop, but had never used it until today.

This simple composition was my laptop's maiden effort with Photoshop.

I've always been fond of sundown/sunrise pictures ... and dark-colored pictures.  This one was fun to play with -- and I think that the "play" part of it was the most valuable result. I know I don't "play" enough with my talents; maybe one day I'll rediscover how to do that ... and then find myself at the Pearly Gates, asking, "Do we get computers with Photoshop on them?"

A Graphic

I'm getting a little lazy about the "every day" thing, it seems. 

Sunday I watched football and that was about it; Monday I did this simple graphic for the cover image accompanying "Rat in the Attic."

Tuesday I seemed to have no time to spare before Staff Meeting, and after that, was too tired to do anything but read.

Bitty Things

Last night I finished "Rat in the Attic."

I've been working on it a little at a time, trying to take a more measured approach than my usual shotgun technique of just hammering words out and gleaning them later. I think I might want to add one more sentence to the first few paragraphs ... but maybe not. In spite of trying to keep it brief, I ended up with nearly 2500 words. I'm pretty sure, however, that I'll revisit the characters in the future.

So I've written a little every day, except for Sunday and Monday, when I made 6 pumpkin pies. I made the shells Sunday, and filled them Monday. I also did a quick rat sketch from a picture I found online, to try to get a sense of what a rat looks like, for the eventual re-depiction of Jimmy the Rat.

Also last night I did a quick sketch on a large sheet of paper of a tall jar. It was just for the limbering of fingers, not for any real work. Still, it was something new.

Tomorrow it goes into the recycle bag.

Rattiness

Last night I worked on a short story I've been kicking around called "Rat in the Attic."

I was exhausted after making Thanksgiving dinner (which Bernie and I have decided that overall was THE best feast we've ever done in 33 years of married life), but I wanted to do a little something of writing. 400 words got me to a point in the tale where I have to stop and think about how I want it to move.

This afternoon I had another look at it and was pleased enough with how it played. However, I did make a mental note at my penchant for rat jokes. I honestly don't know how that got started. But it gave me "The Ballad of Jimmy the Rat" and "Fever Dreams 107."

It's sad that the original graphics for "Jimmy the Rat" were lost. I guess that just will have to be another two creative efforts in the near future, making new ones.

Catching Up

This blue composition was the cover image for Pavelle Wesser's story, "Divine Destiny."

I knew Lydia Manx had some water pictures in her gallery, so I (she lets me play with her toys, really) pulled a segment and leached out all the color, messed with the contrast, inverted it, and then put some color back in. And then filtered it with "Paint Daubs." Creepy, wet and surreal -- that's what I was aiming for.

I really have been creating something every day. During NaNoWriMo, my goal is to write 2000 words every day, thereby finishing up on the 25th, which I did.

Gratefully.

In past years, and indeed, over the course of the past year and some, I have written some dreck. Some dull, I'm sure, and some maudlin and hokey. But I don't mind writing dreck if I enjoy the dreck.

This 2008 NaNovel was sort of dreck. I think that it could, if tended to and coddled and paced and researched, be a readable tale... but I absolutely hated writing it. The characters were all kind of stupid to begin with, and I had little respect for them, and no time to find a way to respect them. I wanted them to be funny, but they weren't. They were desperate, and what scenes were supposed to be amusing sounded more like whistling in the dark.

Most of what I wrote relied on uninteresting word fill, until I was within whacking distance of the 50k word goal, and then I just skipped the damn tortuous story and wrote the end. The main character made a counter-cultural choice that will probably mess up the rest of her life, and the secondaries were either unaccounted for or did things they will regret. Good riddance to them all.

The previous Monday, I did this cover image for Tyler Willson's story, "The Prisoner."

Using a photograph I took, I deleted the original sky, amped up the contrasts, drenched the landscape with redness, did a sketch filter, put in a gradient for the sky, and put some bars on it.

Yeah. I like red.

Cover Image

I trust this image won't be so difficult to blog as the previous three. Jeeze.

This one was a modification of a public domain image. In the original picture, the woman's head was really amorphous. It was only after repeated filterings that it became apparent that there might be something on her head.

We'll call that something an emerging deformed brain, okay?

Calaca Cover

I was working on a cover for the Press, for a story called "Boss."

It being the Press' November theme, Mes de los Muertos, I chose to make the cover image a calaca, a skeleton mimicking a real person.

Using black construction paper, I began

 construction with a light blue pastel pencil, then added some interesting colors. Naples yellow, a purple, a dark blue.

The picture was too dull.

I added a bold bright blue, a cerise, an orange, a neon green, but though it was closer to what I had seen in my mind's eye, it was not enough.

Hovering above the sketch on a footstool with my digital camera, I became well aware once again that light applied to black paper produces a shitty result. So I took what I had and transferred the picture to my computer, and opened the file in Photoshop.

I selected the background black, and washed over that with real black. Using the "Magic Wand" tool, I got the rest of the blacks and made them real black.

Then I selected "Adjustments" and "Saturation" and amped up the colors. Yeah. That was what I was looking for, and in the end, got the image I was trying to achieve.

P. S. I have to say that whatever it is that Google is doing with their settings is really total suckation. It used to be so easy to upload multiple pictures, and now it's a major pain in the butt. this post looks little like what I tried to upload.

NaNoWriMo Again!

It's November 1st, and I have already ticked out my day's quota of words.

I like to get a minimum of 2000 words per day; it gives me some playing room. This morning I went cheerfully out to the garage-studio with my laptop, opened the door to the stormy-looking sky, and typed a first chapter of 2033 words.

The story is called Going Hungry, and was initially intended to be a farsical attack on the culinary capabilities of a cook I once knew, whose cooking was really AWFUL but whose employers kept saying was unbelievably good. However, as I started thinking about the main character, who will be the cook's assistant, she began to change before my very [inner] eye.

As the book progresses, Gloria is going to have to learn how to appear humble at work in the kitchen, but at home be the head and the goad of the household. The family is wiped out financially, and the rest of the family are ready to just give up.

Ultimately Gloria will have to come to terms not only with her willingness to do whatever she has to do to survive, but also with what others can and will do. Going hungry isn't always about the stomach.

Here's an excerpt:

In the kitchen, her mother was pouring vodka over ice cubes in a highball glass. Gloria frowned as the woman splashed a little Seven-Up over the liquor to fill the glass, then raised it and swallowed down about half of it. The boys weren't home, for which Gloria was grateful. Seeing their mother swilling booze like this would not be right. When the liquid was gone, her mother tipped the Smirnoff's bottle again, nearly filling the glass. Again she poured a little Seven-Up to flavor it.

Halfway through the second glass, she looked up at the clock. "Ben and Will said they'd be home around seven," she croaked, her voice rough and loud, resonating in her swollen sinuses. "You're going to have to make dinner for them -- I don't want them to see me like this." She topped off her glass again with vodka, not bothering with the soda.

 "Mom, you shouldn't be ... "

 "Leave it alone, Gloria. It's not like I'm some drunk. I thought we were going to be all right, but I just found out I was wrong. Really, really wrong. Don't you understand? I'm losing my job. We're going to lose the house. We don't even have enough to pay for a damn apartment, so let me have some kind of anesthetic for one night, okay?"

 "What? What are you talking about? I thought we were doing all right -- didn't Dad -- I mean, he said to me last spring that we were -- that -- 'everything's coming up roses' for us now ...  "

 "Sit down," her mother said. "I hate to have to do this, but I don't think I have a choice." The liquor had relaxed the bunched muscles of her face, and soothed her voice a little. She hadn't begun to slur, though Gloria suspected that was going to occur shortly.

 "I thought we had life insurance on the mortgage," she said. "Your Dad signed up for it when we bought the house, so that if anything happened to him, the house would be paid off. And then there was his own insurance policy -- he cashed the old one in when we bought this place so we had money to remodel it, but he took out another one, so I thought we were okay, at least for a few years." 

"But what, now?" Gloria felt her hands begin to sweat.

 "He stopped paying the premiums in March. The policies were cancelled. I found out when I got home from work. Good thing they let us leave early because of the bad news about the layoffs, huh?"

 "Oh, shit, Mom, why?"

 "I have no idea. We always divvied up the bill paying. I took care of the groceries, clothes, and the utilities, and he always took care of the rent and car payments and credit cards. Well, we got nothing now. Even if I kept my job at the drug store, it wouldn't be enough to get by, not by a long shot." She rubbed her eyes with one hand, keeping the other on the sweating glass of ice and vodka.

"No savings?" 

"A little, but not much. The funeral ate up most of what was there. We've got enough for another month's mortgage payment, and that's it. I'm so sorry, honey."

Gloria was young enough that the words had almost no meaning for her. Her father had had a pretty good job; the family wanted for nothing. Their toys, their appliances, their computers were all top of the line. It was only about four years ago that they'd bought this house, but Gloria had always assumed that they rented houses in the various neighborhoods they'd lived in so that they could save up enough for a down payment. She could not remember any time in her life that the family scrimped on anything; her mother often told people that she took a job in the drug store for something to do while the kids were in school.

Cars were on the list of things that were top of the line, too. Well, not top like a Cadillac or a Jaguar, but always new. Her dad was of the opinion that if you held onto a car more than three years, the maintenance offset the trade in value of the car. Every year for as long as Gloria could remember, the salesman at the dealership sent her father a birthday card and a Christmas card. When she and Will had finished high school, new cars had been waiting for them at the curb when they got back from the graduation ceremony.

"But Dad made good money, didn't he? There has to be some kind of savings account -- maybe with his company?"

 Her mother shook her head, gulped another big swallow of the drink. "No, honey, there wasn't." She sighed. "Your dad used to say, 'Smoke 'em if you got 'em," and he meant to live life as fine as he could for as long as he could. He just didn't think he could die."

Where did the week go?

I know I haven't been a complete slacker this past week. I just don't know where the time went.

On Saturday, I wrote a crappy short poem. Sunday was football and potsticker day, a weekly adventure that is adding tightness to the waistband of my jeans. 

Monday I did this pen and Photoshop cover image.

One day I made a stellar batch of lima bean potpie (possibly my favorite food of all time), another a pork tip dinner, another a huge batch of macaroni salad for Bernie to take to a company pot luck, where it was eaten up completely.

I started a new pastel pencils sketch one of those days, and on another, rather thoroughly cleaned my new workspace and turned it into a real-looking studio, complete with swept and vacuumed floor, a clean chair for visitors, and all the piles of garage junk thrown out, sorted, and put away. (Now I like it better than the rest of the house.)

A couple evenings I wrote a little, but not a lot.

But it feels uncomfortable, not having posted here all week.

A White Sketch

This morning, I was thumbing through a National Geographic and saw an ad that had a picture of a polar bear.

The Bogus unbleached drawing pad seemed to lend itself to attempting a sketch (it always does, but it also almost always disappoints me -- not enough "tooth" or roughness) so off I went with a very limited palette: white, cobalt blue, light gray, dark turquoise, cool dark brown, and a touch of black.

I started out with pastel pencils, which are fairly hard, and then shifted to soft pastels for the blue. For the first time, I used a foam make-up wedge to smooth the colors of the background... and hated the result.

Switching back to the pencils, I intensified the color of the foreground and background with crosshatching and no smoothing, and I liked the result much better. Hours later, i can see where I could have added a touch more blue on the bear's fur. 

And this is the other day's work, with a little bit of mistiness added.

The above mentioned foam makeup triangles did well for adding a touch of mist.

So many of these sketches are less than stellar, but I'm having a good time playing with them.

Two Days' Effort

Last Christmas, Bernie gifted me with Astrobrights cardstock -- neon pink, bright yellow, orange, red, and green.

I used a couple sheets for greeting cards, but was fairly stumped as to how to use the rest. However, Lillian the Covetous and Color-Craving began begging me for sheets. I decided to emulate her, and so dragged some vividly colored sheets out to the new studio to play with.

There's the mess I was fiddling with Tuesday, and today, Thursday (23 October).

By no means is it done. But I wanted to take a picture of it to show what it looked like before I ruin it trying to finish it tomorrow.

Also, I have to add that working on eye-searing paper ... uh, duh, sears my eyeballs.

We'll hand in a final decision when the thing is done.

O The Embarrassment

I've been working on a new pastel, and the preliminary sketch for next week's Press cover, and furiously made three pages of notes for my upcoming NaNovel, but the completed item today was more crappy poetry. It's about creative efforts ... kind of.

Remember, it's supposed to be crappy.

A fat frog in a blender --
Not an image you should render
Even if you have been on a three-week bender.
It's sure to make someone puke.

"A cook who's being petty
Will put pigs' feet on spaghetti
And instead of apple, make Broccoli Brown Betty,
Daring diners to rebuke.

"You should not sew a ruffle
On a khaki Army duffle
It will make soldiers weep and stomp off in a huffle,
And the nation then would fall.

"But if you are going to write
And bring 50 thou words to light
Just pound out those flagrant phrases, pound with all your might.
It's November, after all.

An Abstract

Okay, this was actually last Monday's creative effort, but the upload of the picture didn't work right for some reason.

I started this with an image from the Smithsonian's Flickr stuff, found the angles cool, and proceeded to add color to it, with a limited palette.

It's a palette selection that pleases me, as you can see from the autumn hues that I chose for the other work above. 

Learning Patience

This was today's effort.

It's a practice piece; an art book I bought called Drawing: A Complete Course by Jenny Rodwell has this as a study of shapes in charcoal and chalk, to be done on gray paper, so as to automatically do medium tones.

I have no gray paper, but I do have a brown coarse paper, and since I didn't have artist chalk or vine charcoal sticks, I used soft pastels in dark brown and white. And a Q-tip for shading, since I no longer have a supply of tortillons.

When I copied the proposed grouping (starting with a pastel pencil in naples yellow),  the centering and balance were off, so I added another shape on the left.

The best part of this exercise was doing it in my new work area in the garage. My old work table has been elevated to a standing work station, with a tall drafting stool when I want to sit. I opened the garage door for a beautiful morning light, and loved having a wide open work area again after a year of trying to use this all-too-cluttered desk. 

Yes, that was the best part. By the time I was nearly done I was tired of brown and white, and irritated with the explanation in the text and the mistakes in the lighting of the example.

However, it did warm me back up on some fundamentals, and I had the very pleasant experience of having Bernie come out to sit and have coffee with me while I worked. I'm besotted with the work area, the more so since Bernie decided I needed better light in there and went out and bought a new ceiling fixture.

I should probably do about fifty million of this kind of practice, but I know I won't.

A Familiar-Looking Baboon

Looking through a National Geographic magazine, I spotted a baboon in the background of an ad, and decided to make that my first sketch in a new notebook.

Reminds me of Narsai. It's not the greatest sketch in the world, but I did clean most of the common areas of the house today, do laundry, and assemble my lovely, lovely new studio drafting stool, as well as tear apart my natural-light floor lamp and re-assemble it as a table lamp.

This is the first sketch I did out there in the new studio area. 

Graphite pencil. 9B, as soft as you get without resorting to vine charcoal.

Thursday the 16th of October

Okay, it's nothing great.

But I wanted to write some crappy free verse stuff for a thread (link later) in a forum. And here it is:

i was conversing with tejon just the other day
and he said that he thought my penchant
for crappy poetry would be my downfall
i told him that a downfall would at least
be some sort of movement
be it right direction or not
aser he replied you have no direction at all
you're right I told him and that is why no matter which way
i move i can count it as progress

your progress is another woman s landfill he told me
but i reminded him
that there are a lot of gullies to fill up
in west virginia

he was annoyed but could not refute me

the best he could come up with was
but maybe they like having gullies

fine i conceded
i ll send my stuff to shore up the levees
in new orleans

he laughed and gave me the address for homeland security
and the mayor s office in that beleaguered city

I love Don Marquis "Archy and Mehitabel" stuff, and have tried to emulate it since I discovered it 42 years ago. I should do more of it since I enjoy it so much.

Also, I flagrantly bought yet another drawing pad, this one spiral bound, named "Sketch Journal". I hope to begin using it tomorrow, and in addition to whatever writing I do, have a bit of sketch every day.

Fish for Fun

I completely missed yesterday, probably due to Staff Meeting ... and because I was just a slug in the hours of the early day, and the only thing I did was pet the dog, post on the NaNoWriMo Forum, and make lamb steaks with mashed potatoes, gravy, and sweet corn.

But today, even though I was tired from dunging out my horse's paddock and riding through the orchards in the dusty harvesting, I did make time to sit down and draw a fish sculpture, and then put color, shadow, and pattern on it in Photoshop.

It was fun. Pointless, but fun.

Monday: Hold Your Nose!

On the forums of NaNoWriMo, there is a section near the bottom called Off-Topic.

Within the Off-Topic forum there is a thread called "Did someone say, 'Urinal cakes?'" Don't worry ... it's a years-long story. (Six? Can it really be a sixth year of urinal cake jokes?) Yesterday I spent much of my idle mind time creating poetry. But not just any poetry -- this poem had to be truly stupid and crappy, designed to make people groan with loathing. Pointless, bad poetry.

Mmm. I think I succeeded. I can hardly bear to look at it myself.

"They flew through the air
with the greatest of ease
powered by a hand-dryer pair
above Badger's fleas

"More powerful than a hovercraft
Faster than an elephant on the moon
Cooler than Huck Finn's river raft
Admired by Alice the Goon

"Aliens and giant squids tried
To catch them, always asking why
They traveled that way. But they only cried,
"It's the only way to fly!"

I'll try to work on something a little less repellent today.

Saturday's Bit

I tend to be more representational in my art; abstracts are hard.

Or maybe I wasn't really allowed to scribble as a kid, and so stifled my inner abstractivity. In any event, when I found myself using a funky brush in Photoshop, and it felt good, I just went with it. I'd picked out the colors a few days before to go with Mel Trent's story (coming up this next week) called "Cooties: A Love Story." (Link later)

That was Saturday, October 11. Sunday I took off to cuddle with my husband all day long.

A Grouping For Color

I was looking at the peppers and apples dumped haphazardly on the counter today (I don't eat apples or peppers, so don't blame me) when I was mesmerized by the shading of colors on the peppers, so dark, from green to red and red to green.

I think I would like to try to paint or draw this; but for today, the arrangement and its subsequent treatment in Photoshop will have to suffice for a visual on creativity.

Besides, I made five dozen oatmeal-raisin cookies from the family recipe this morning.

Another Effort, and Learning

I wasn't happy with the scorched ear as the cover image for next week's Press. (Link when it gets there).

I had a different idea today, and went along well with it until I got to the background graphic in Photoshop. Asking Alex for guidance, I ended up learning far more than I had wanted to know, but in the end, we came up with a graphic that was agreeable to me.

At least ... it makes me snicker.

Today's Effort

On Task

There is no task but this;
No Time, no Earth, no nation.
No Lover here to kiss,
Just me for the duration.

Well, not just me, but this:
Attention, work, and purpose.
No company I miss,
No thoughts of 'rich' or 'famous.'

A kind of Heaven, here,
Distractions far from dragging
My mind to any fear
My spirit any lagging.

Step by step, stroke by stroke,
I build a bridge to Progress;
My job is not a joke --
The worth is in the process.

For I know what to do
And yes, who else would do it?
And who else would want to?
Nobody likes to edit.

Let me just say here, after 20 minutes trying to get this post to come out the way I wanted to without having to flick back and forth retyping it, that Google is a fuck up when it comes to interacting with "Word". There was no way I could compose in Word and copy and paste to this blog, and that is just plain old shit. It used to work. It doesn't work now. Therefore, I must assume that the change is for spite, and now I am on my guard about Google. Corporate hostilities are a given in this world, but I'm really sick and tired of us consumers being screwed over every time big guns feel a need to take aim at each other. It doesn't matter whether it's the US and Iraq or Google and Microsoft.

Assholes.

Writing Again

Here's an excerpt from what I wrote this evening

He was glad of that, as he was tired of crying from the horror of finding Debbie's body, her coldness and stillness and stench in their bed. She had to have done it right after he left for work, a night shift at WalMart. The shift differential gave them some extra dollars, but she hated that he worked nights while she worked days, cutting into their play-times together, sex and recreational sips and smokes.

It's not great art, but I worked most of the day today on the Press, and just let go with some words for this evening. It's hacky, but no worse than some of the crap I see on the supermarket shelves.

Burnt Ear

So Friday I made macaroni salad, enough to feed16 people a nice portion. Cheryl assures me that such an effort counts for creative work.

So then, must the barbecue sauce I made on Saturday to go with 15 pounds of ribs. Although I wrote the recipe down for the Piker Press, I made three batches of the sauce without looking at the recipe.

Sunday I rested from the onslaught of guests, who must have enjoyed themselves because they didn't hurry off after the meal was done.

Today I played around with an image of an assaulted ear, in Photoshop. I don't know if I'll use it for a cover image or not, but it was an interesting effort.

That's what the resolution is all about.

Poetry

A surprise visit from an old friend prompted me to write a bit of poetry. This is a good thing, because I was too tired to try to tackle writing fiction or artwork.

...Young

On my doorstep
So different
After so many years
Than when we were...

A split second of confusion
Then exclamations at meeting again
Since when we were...

Your hair longer
Mine much grayer
You and I changed our shapes
From when we were...

Both of us have changed our careers
Peace is ascendant, unlike memories
Of when we were...

Much wiser now
Much calmer now
No foolishness afoot
As when we were...

We take stock of each others' lives
We promise to stay in touch, as close as
How when we were...

We say goodbye
Remembering
Our wild gusts of laughter
Oh! When we were...

Your smile is just as beautiful
As when we clinked our glasses together
Back when we were...

I don't know if the poem is done yet or not. It was a creative effort for the day, however, and I'll look at it again in a few days, decide whether or not to continue working on it, or possibly forget I ever wrote it.

Bwah-ha-ha!

When we recently had a new fence put in, a pipe broke beside the house; this pipe carried water to my back yard sprinkler system. 

It wasn't a problem to fix; pipes aren't buried very deeply. Howie, my faithful dog, and I dug out and exposed the problem area of the pipe; then Bernie put his manly muscles into the job and shoveled out a spacious area so that fixing it wouldn't be awkward.

Indeed, it wasn't awkward: one trip to the hardware store for fittings and fresh pipe plus five minutes of labor and voila! Happy dry pipe!

We turned on the sprinklers and yes, the repair worked just fine. However, the sprinklers in the garden did not. Following along the line of the irrigation line, not only were there clogs of dirt, but the 1/2 inch tubing had been pretty well chewed up by the digging and fencing. 

Now when I first ran this irrigation line, ten years or so ago, I had a completely different landscape in mind. Over the years, as plants were moved, removed, or added, I just modified the emitters, adding bits and pieces here and there. Looking at the line to see where it needed fixed, I realized I had no idea what on earth I had been thinking long ago, and just decided to rip it all out and start over.

That's what I did today. 100 feet of irrigation hose and emitters for each major piece of shrubbery. It is so efficient compared to the mess that was there, it almost makes me laugh. Testing the system was a moment of delight: my project works, and works well.

So I did create something today!

Back To Resolution

Some months ago I deleted this blog, as the creative effort of my resolve settled down into simply parking myself in a comfy chair with my laptop and writing, writing, writing... and my posts were very boring. "I wrote another 500/1100/43 words this evening/last night/this afternoon."

Not very interesting, especially when I wasn't about to share what I was writing -- some of it was too personal, some of it was too saccharine, and some of it just plain stupid. But it was therapeutic, as I worked through my grief over my sister's death, and therefore of value to me.

Some 200,000 words later, I've stopped writing every day; a tangled partial novel sits on my desk in a box (the other two are still in files on the computer) waiting for me to edit the tangles out of it so that I can go on and finish it. Eventually it will appear as a serial fiction piece in The Piker Press.

The idea of editing just puts a huge block on my creativity, and so, for the past couple weeks, the most creative stuff to come out have been the cover images for the Press. I'll post my most recent favorite here.

The picture was done first in plain old pencil; when I decided on the lines I switched to a super-soft 9B solid graphite pencil, which goes on paper almost like ink.

Then I scanned it into Photoshop for color.

It accompanies Mel Trent's story "End of the Line" from her book The Immortal Guns of Talon Constantine.

Many thanks to Wendy Robards for mentioning this blog in hers.